“Geography, sir, is ruinous in its effects on the lower classes. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are comparatively safe, but geography invariably leads to revolution.”
(1879 testimony before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, London, England, regarding expenditures of the London School Board)

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Well, we city-dwellers have known
all along that it is more environmentally beneficial to live in high density
urban areas. But now we have the
unfortunate evidence that, alas, any carbon footprint benefits accruing to
cities are more than offset by the much higher carbon footprint of our suburban
counterparts in the nearby hinterlands, and based upon a visual inspection of
the mapped data, it appears that the wealthier suburban communities are
definitely the bigger energy hogs than their poorer suburban neighbors or rural
areas. There are a series of cool
interactive maps (at http://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/maps
and thanks, Tom Paino, for sending me the link) allowing you to zoom into any
zipcode in the continental US and see how the annual household carbon footprint
has been tallied, considering transportation, housing, food, goods, and
services. My zipcode, 10033 in
Washington Heights, NYC, for example, is rather carbon thrifty, at 34.6 metric
tons of CO2 equivalent, while just across the Hudson River in 07632
Englewood Cliffs, NJ, it is nearly double at 69.5, and in Old Westbury, on Long
Island to the east of NYC, it is 95, almost triple.

Baltimore City, MD (21201) is
positively parsimonious at 25, and Baltimore shows up on the map as a green
oasis in a sea of reds and oranges, denoting the surrounding suburban household
carbon footprints double that of the inner city. There was one thing that I question on this
map and that is there is no legend, so we cannot see what the class ranges are
for each color. When you touch on each
zipcode, the stats for that zipcode pop up, but it seemed to me that the same
color represented different ranges, perhaps dependent upon the state. Therefore it is difficult to make any
consistent inferences based on the zipcode color, which obviously can be
somewhat misleading in making visual comparisons.

There are two other interactive
maps: Average annual household energy (electricity, natural gas, other) carbon
footprint by zipcode (where, again the contrast between Washington Heights in
Upper Manhattan around 6 and Old Westbury at 16 is amazing!).

The third map is average monthly
vehicle miles traveled per household by zipcode, (and of course in many parts
of NYC, households have on average as low as 0.1 vehicle per household. In other words, in many parts of the city,
only one in 10 households has a car, on average. The vehicle miles traveled is figured by
multiplying vehicle miles traveled per month by the number of vehicles per household.
I found the assumptions of this
calculation a little odd – nearly every zipcode in the country had households
driving about 1,200- 1,400 miles per month, and I think there should be much
more variation in this figure. Only in
some isolated areas in the western and northern US were households driving
1,500-1,700 miles per month, otherwise it seems that every household puts on essentially
the same mileage. I think if you live in
NYC and are crazy enough to have a car there, the last thing you would be doing
is sitting in your car racking up 1,200 miles a month. If so, that’s about all you would have time
to do traveling at the snail’s pace that is NYC traffic! That’s an average of 40 miles per day, and
virtually no one within the city would drive a 40 miles per day commute or just
go joy-riding around for 40 miles per day.

But other than those relatively
minor cavils (and knowing how difficult it is to keep a nation-wide study
consistent when there is such extreme variation across zipcodes) the maps are
fascinating and the study seems sound.

This shows how the suburban areas create a much higher carbon footprint than the cities or rural areas, from Philadelphia to New York City.

Here’s the abstract from the paper
the maps in which the maps appear:

“Which municipalities and locations within the United States
contribute the most to household greenhouse gas emissions, and what is the
effect of population density and suburbanization on emissions? Using national
household surveys, we developed econometric models of demand for energy,
transportation, food, goods, and services that were used to derive average
household carbon footprints (HCF) for U.S. zip codes, cities, counties, and
metropolitan areas. We find consistently lower HCF in urban core cities (40
tCO2e) and higher carbon footprints in outlying suburbs (50 tCO2e), with a
range from 25 to >80 tCO2e in the 50 largest metropolitan areas. Population
density exhibits a weak but positive correlation with HCF until a density
threshold is met, after which range, mean, and standard deviation of HCF
decline. While population density contributes to relatively low HCF in the
central cities of large metropolitan areas, the more extensive suburbanization
in these regions contributes to an overall net increase in HCF compared to
smaller metropolitan areas. Suburbs alone account for 50% of total U.S. HCF.
Differences in the size, composition, and location of household carbon
footprints suggest the need for tailoring of greenhouse gas mitigation efforts
to different populations.”

Thursday, January 16, 2014

The Waldseemuller Map of the
World, #5 in The Atlantic’s list of 12 Maps that Changed the World

“This work by
the German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller is considered the most expensive
map in the world because, as Brotton notes, it is "America's birth
certificate"—a distinction that prompted the Library of Congress tobuy it from a German princefor $10 million. It is the first map to recognize
the Pacific Ocean and the separate continent of "America," which
Waldseemuller named in honor of the then-still-living Amerigo Vespucci, who
identified the Americas as a distinct landmass (Vespucci and Ptolemy appear at
the top of the map). The map consists of
12 woodcuts and incorporates many of the latest discoveries by European
explorers (you get the sense that the woodcutter was asked at the last minute
to make room for the Cape of Good Hope). ‘This is the moment when the world
goes bang, and all these discoveries are made over a short period of time,’
Brotton says.”

I would
agree with most of their picks - who could dispute the importance of maps by
Ptolmey, Al-Idrisi, the T-in-O Mappa Mundi, Waldseemuller, Mercator, the
Gall-Peters projection, and so forth - although a couple of their top 12 seem
rather removed from global significance, to my mind, but nevertheless they are
all fabulous maps/mapping efforts. My
list would probably be a bit different, and I don’t think I would be able to
pick just 12! (I have a problem
restricting myself!) I might have added
in or substituted the following 12 maps (in no particular order of importance):

John Snow’s map, pinpointing
cholera deaths and the location of public water pumps in Soho, London.

2.

The US Public
Land Survey System (PLSS), begun in about 1785 at Thomas Jefferson’s behest, which
platted townships and sections in most of what is now the United States, and
which basically laid an imaginary grid over the whole country in the spirit of
the rational age of the Founding Fathers.
The PLSS shaped the landscape of the entire continental US (outside of
the original 13 colonies and a few other earlier-settled eastern states);

1885 Township platting of Kent,
Ohio

3.

The UK
Ordnance Survey (definitely!) which was extremely influential and innovative,
and set the standard for many national mapping programs (including the massive
effort of mapping the Indian subcontinent), and introduced many ground-breaking
surveying and cartographic techniques.
The OS maps are still vitally important today, and many visitors to the
UK who use the maps marvel at the extreme detail and the very large scale –
some series are 6 inches to the mile! See http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/08/map-addict.html

Detail of an Ordnance Survey map
in the UK, the original impetus of which was military defense and intelligence
gathering. The village of Wooten Bridge,
surveyed in 1862.

4.

On a more
localized level, in terms of impact, the maps resulting from the surveyor’s
mapping of the Mason-Dixon Line between north and south U.S., with its very
real ramifications on people’s lives in the 19th and even 20th
centuries. The Mason-Dixon line was
surveyed in 1763-1767 in response to a border dispute between some of the American
colonies prior to the Revolutionary War.
It has become understood in the conventional wisdom to symbolize a
cultural boundary between the northern and southern states, and also served (unintentionally)
as a rough line of demarcation separating slave-holding states from states
where slavery was illegal. This line was
unofficially extended out as the country grew westerly, and the subsequent maps
that resulted depicted the country divided into slave and non-slave states, as
famously seen in the Abraham Lincoln painting of signing the Emacipation
Proclamation; http://www.finebooksmagazine.com/issue/1104/mason-dixon-2.phtml

The map prepared by the surveyors
Mason and Dixon, on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society in Greenwich, UK,
using some instrumentation and methods not readily available to colonial
surveyors, which increased the accuracy of the survey.

Lincoln signing the Emancipation
Proclamation, featuring the map showing the country divided into slave and
non-slave states. The map appears at the
bottom right corner of the painting, and was made by the U.S. Coast Survey in
1861 using census data from 1860, and shows the relative prevalence of slavery
in Southern counties that year.The painting is now hanging in the U.S. Capitol Building.

5.

The 1811
Commissioner’s Plan for the proposed gridiron layout of NYC, which more or less
created the real estate frenzy that continues to define New York City, not to
mention the uniquely simple and topography-erasing street pattern of Manhattan,
which persists to this day. The grid
plan for NYC was in keeping with the US PLSS, and influenced many cities to
adopt the rationality and ease of wayfinding of the grid, thus rejecting the
more organic form that most European cities had as an artifact of the mediaeval
era.

A detail of the 1520 Leo
Africanus map, derived and compiled from a collection of maps Leo was traveling
with when he was captured by pirates in the Mediterranean Sea. These maps helped save Leo’s life from the
pirates, since he had no one to ransom him, and so was otherwise worthless to
them, but he did have the maps, which the pirates recognized as valuable. They sold Leo Africanus (and the maps) to the
Pope as a slave.

7.

In that
vein, I would also have to include The
Catalan Atlas, 1375, by
the Jewish cartographer Abraham Cresques of Majorca, Spain, which was partially
a type of Portolan navigational chart, a cutting-edge and more accurate
technique at that time, and the map was also considered to be the most complete
picture of geographical knowledge as it stood in the later Middle Ages. See: http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/04/rediscovering-african-geographies.html

Detail
of the 1375 Catalan Atlas

8.

Speaking of Africa, how could we neglect to mention the
famous Berlin Conference of 1884-1885 (also known as the Congo Conference) where
Africa was divided up on a map amongst all the major European powers of the
day. That dividing-up map still
reverberates today with the borders of countries having nothing to do with
tribal areas, language or cultural groups of the indigenous peoples, dividing
people who should have been kept together, and putting together people who
didn’t want to be together, and based solely on “equitably” spreading out the
“spoils” of African resources amongst the European colonials who had footholds
in various parts of Africa by then. Many
consider this map to be the un-doing of Africa.
See http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/04/rediscovering-african-geographies.html

The Partition of Africa - The Berlin Conference Map of 1885

9.

The 1602 Matteo
Ricci map of the world. Ricci was a
Jesuit priest who traveled as a missionary to China in 1583. In
1602, Ricci and his Chinese collaborators created the first map of the world in
Chinese, now called “The Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography,” because of its
rarity, importance, and exoticism. Its name in Chinese isKūnyú Wànguó Quántú;
literally “A Map of the Myriad Countries of the World”; in Italian, “Carta Geografica Completa di tutti i Regni del Mondo;”
or “Complete Geographical Map of all the Kingdoms of the World,” printed in
China at the request of the Chinese Emperor.

This is a
later variation of Ricci's map.The original 1602 Ricci map is a very large, 5 ft (1.52 m)
high and 12 ft (3.66 m) wide, xylograph of a pseudocylindrical map projection,
showing China at the center of the known world. Its projection is similar
to the 1906 Eckert IV map. It is the first map in Chinese to show the
Americas. It was originally carved on six large blocks of wood and then
printed in brownish ink on six mulberry paper panels, similar to the making of
a folding screen. See:http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2011/06/method-of-loci-memory-palace.html

10.

Olaus Magnus’s 1539 Carta Marina
– a map of the ocean showing the Northern Lands. See http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2012/04/motw-4-23-2012ultima-thule.html It is a very large map, about 5 ½ feet wide by 4
feet high. “Magnus' map of the great northland was a fantastic
achievement, its stature undeterred by the liberal use of sea monsters and
other fanciful creatures. The detail in the coastlines (as well as the
depiction of currents between Iceland and the Faroe Islands) as well as
interior features make these among the most detailed maps of the north yet
printed in the 16th century.”

Joseph
Minard’s 1869 flow map showing a detailed and longitudinal view of Napoleon’s
1812 march into Russia, which ended so disastrously for the French
troops. There are a number of variables
portrayed in this 2-dimensional figure, which very beautifully conveys a
complex set of information, according to the wiki entry for Minard:

§the size of the army - providing
a strong visual representation of human suffering, e.g. the sudden decrease of
the army's size at the crossing of the Berezina
river on the
retreat;

§the geographical co-ordinates,
latitude and longitude, of the army as it moved;

§the direction that the army was
traveling, both in advance and in retreat, showing where units split off and
rejoined;

§the location of the army with
respect to certain dates; and

§the weather temperature along the
path of the retreat, in another strong visualisation of events (during the
retreat "one of the worst winters in recent memory set in").

Étienne-Jules
Marey first
called notice to this dramatic depiction of the fate of Napoleon's army in the
Russian campaign, saying it "defies the pen of the historian in its brutal
eloquence"[Edward Tufte says it "may well be the
best statistical graphic ever drawn" and uses it as a prime example
in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Howard Wainer identified Minard's map as a
"gem" of information graphics, nominating it as the "World's
Champion Graph

Minard was a
pioneering cartographic and graphic designer, creating some of the first maps
using pie graphs and other then-novel ways of mapping data.

Minard’s flow map/diagram of
Napoleon’s 1812-1813 march into Russia.

12.

The Blue
Marble satellite image of Earth -In
some ways, these “pictures” of the whole earth from space have been
instrumental in revising the average human’s mindset about our puny and tenuous
existence in the universe, promoting the opposite of a geo-centric outlook,
while at the same time reminding us earth-dwellers of our possibly unique place
in the scheme of things and how fragile our planet actually is. “This NASA moving image, recorded by
satellite over a full year as part of their Blue Marble Project, shows the ebb and flow of the
seasons and vegetation. Both are absolutely crucial factors in every facet of
human existence -- so crucial we barely even think about them. It's also a
reminder that the Earth is, for all its political and social and religious
divisions, still unified by the natural phenomena that make everything else
possible.”

The Blue Marble satellite image
of Earth

Worthy Runners-Up:

A.

Charles
Booth’s 19th century Poverty Maps of London, perhaps the first thematic maps with extensive use of socio-economic mapping, and his exhaustive ground-truthing
methods of information gathering.

Baron
Alexander Von Humboldt’s isotherm map of temperature. He developed the first isotherm maps as well
as some other interesting new ways of geo-visualizing natural data in
2-dimensions. He focused mainly on the
New World, and was an inveterate traveler, being in many cases the first person
mapping areas in South America and other parts of “The Kingdom of New Spain,”
including Mexico, Texas, and parts of what is now the American Southwest. He was also possibly the first person to
proclaim that the continent of South America “fit” into the shape of Africa,
and at one time they were probably joined landmasses. There is an important Pacific current named
after him, a cold current from Antarctica that comes up the west coast of South
America and allows penguins to thrive in the Galapagos Islands on the
Equator.

First map of isotherms, showing mean temperature around the world by
latitude and longitude. Recognizing that temperature depends more on latitude
and altitude, a subscripted graph shows the direct relation of temperature on
these two variables

D.

Dr. Robert
Perry’s 1844 maps of fever epidemic as connected with socio-economic and
housing conditions in Glasgow, Scotland. One of the first of its kind, and pre-dates
the influential John Snow cholera maps by a decade, and the Charles Booth
Poverty Maps by 40 years. The map uses local
medical reports, statistical tables and a color-coded map of the city to
highlight the link between poor sanitation, poverty, and poor health. It
is an excellent example of early thematic mapping, and pre-dates both Charles
Booth’s Poverty Maps of London (1886-1903), and John Snow’s cholera maps of
Soho, London (1854). Perry’s map, with different neighborhood areas
colored differently to designate the severity of the epidemic, made it obvious
that the effects of the epidemic were not distributed evenly throughout the
city, but disproportionately affected the poorest, most densely settled areas,
where as many as 20% of the population had succumbed to the disease. See
more on Robert Perry and the 1843 fever epidemic at http://special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/month/feb2006.html.
Also see http://geographer-at-large.blogspot.com/2012/01/map-of-week-1-9-2012old-glasgow.html

Detail of the Fever Map, showing
fever cases

E.

German
propaganda maps from the 1930’s which helped sway opinion as to the
righteousness of Germany occupying neighboring countries to allow for their
famous “elbow room” to grow the German race and reclaim formerly German
territories.

Typical
propaganda map symbols: (a) arrows represent pressure on Germany from all
sides; (b) circle signifies the encirclement of Germany before and after WWI;
(c) pincers personify the pressure against Germany from France and Poland from
the west and east.

Of course,
my list is heavy on the historically significant maps, and unfortunately this
means that I have given short shrift to modern-day cartographers and
geovisualizers, mainly because they haven’t had sufficient time to demonstrate
their importance yet! There are all
kinds of potentially influential maps being produced today, which is, of course, part of what my blog attempts to bring to light.

In 2010, the
British Library had an exhibit on the World’s Greatest Maps. For their picks, see:

Monday, January 13, 2014

For all you extreme
meteorological/geological events geeks, here are some amazing images of
noteworthy events that took place in 2013.
The geographer-at-large blog seems to be on a roll of re-capping the
year gone by, so here is another retrospective view of 2013.
The captions and text explanations of the images are in Dutch (oh! Excuse
me! Flemish – it’s a Belgian website) but
I think the pictures speak for themselves.
And they are truly magnificent – a sobering reminder, if one is needed, of
the beauty and the power of the forces beyond our control. http://eoedu.belspo.be/nl/news-index.htm?goback=%2Egde_53689_member_5828090886810017795#%21

Friday, January 3, 2014

“The
image above is a screenshot from an amazing
interactive global map of near-real-time wind pattern forecasts, based on
data from the Global Forecast System.
Cameron Beccario, inspired by last year's extremely popular U.S. wind map, built this visualization using
D3 and other javascript modules. The interactive version is really fun to play
with by turning the globe with your mouse, and the patterns are nothing short
of mesmerizing. It's maps like these that make us really
want to learn how to code.”

We are starting off the New Year
with Wired Science’s Best Maps of 2013. Or,
as they titled them, “The Most Amazing, Beautiful, and Viral Maps of the Year.”
A great selection, and of the 15 maps they featured, 3 are about New York
City. I found this one, NYC Henge, to be
particularly interesting.

“Twice a year, the
setting sun lines up with the street grid of New York City's Manhattan,
creating an incredible show and a free-for-all for amateur photographers. The
phenomenon is known as Manhattanhenge, but the map above, dubbed NYCHenge and made by Javier Santana shows when and where the show
can be caught all across New York City, any day of the year.”

Welcome to the random notes of the geographer-at-large

This is a blog about maps, GISc, and all things geographical. And, of course, any other place-based topics that strike my fancy at the moment! Please roam around the blog and take a look. Your Host and Raconteur, The Map Monkey.

Globe of the World, carved from a calabash gourd, Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC

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